October 12, 2012
At an
event specially organised at the New York Stock Exchange, in Wall
Street, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono boasted to the assembled businessmen of the
abundant natural resources on offer to potential investors.
“You can find almost everything
in Indonesia: oil and gas, coal, geothermal energy, tin, copper, nickel,
aluminum, bauxite, iron, cacao, coffee,” SBY said. “When it comes to oil, we
have oil underground, under the sea and even above the ground: palm oil.”
Indonesia’s ambassador to the US, Dino Patti Djalal, opened the event by
quipping that “today, Indonesia occupies Wall Street”. While the comment earned
a laugh, outside the building real Occupy activists staged protests to mark the
one-year anniversary of the grassroots movement.
Maybe the irony was lost on Dino. The Occupy movement’s loose manifesto, railing
against the corporatisation of democracy and the inequitable distribution of
wealth, has a certain resonance in an Indonesian context. In Indonesia, money
politics is the norm and big business routinely prioritises profit
over equity.
A demonstration of that principle was abundantly clear 10,000 miles
away, in Indonesian Borneo, while SBY made his speech. In the regency of West
Kutai, two oil palm companies were in the middle of bulldozing forests belonging
to the indigenous Dayak Benuaq community of Muara Tae.
The activities of logging, mining and plantation companies in Muara Tae
are a vision of unfettered capitalism writ large. It’s a neoliberal dream.
The theory behind the development paradigm rolled out in rural Indonesia is
that allowing big firms to take over vast areas of land will have a
trickle-down effect on local communities. It will fund infrastructure, create
local jobs, pick communities up by their bootstraps and set them on the way to
prosperity.
But as with unregulated investment banking, unregulated plantation
development in Indonesia has been a disaster. In Muara Tae, the companies are,
right now, destroying the forests and farmlands the Dayak Benuaq depend on,
depriving them of the land that has sustained them for generations. It’s a
situation that has occurred in villages across the archipelago over the past
two decades, repeating itself like a bad dream, casting thousands into
landlessness and deeper into poverty.
The global economic crisis was something of a Road to Damascus moment
for many in the West. It gave birth to a new generation of activists driven by
the realisation that the system was fundamentally corrupted, and epitomised by
the Occupy movement.
The Dayak Benuaq in Muara Tae have exercised their own form of
non-violent direct action to oppose the expropriation of their forests. With support,
they may yet win and retain their rights, livelihoods and culture. In the
longer term, the challenge is for politicians like SBY to change the system
that gave rise to this problem and to ensure that the exploitation of
Indonesia’s natural resources benefit its poorest people.
That statement is not as revolutionary as it might seem. Huge
progress could be made simply by the legal recognition of the customary land
rights of Indonesia’s indigenous communities, such as the Dayak Benuaq, and
ensuring that they’re respected by companies. In July 2012, a UN report
PDF recommended that Indonesia do exactly this. It also suggested that it
ratify International Labour
Organisation Convention 169, a legally binding international
instrument protecting the rights of indigenous peoples.
Three weeks before SBY’s sojourn in New York, Indonesia submitted its response
PDFto the recommendations. While it “supports the promotion and
protection of indigenous people worldwide”, Indonesia “does not recognise the
application of the indigenous people concept as defined in the UN Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the country”.
In sum? Indonesia’s open for business: come and get it (and don’t worry
about the pesky natives).
Tom Johnson
Forests Campaigner
Forests Campaigner
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